From internationally acclaimed, Man Booker Prize–winning author Anne Enright comes a shattering novel set in a small town on Ireland’s Atlantic coast. The Green Road is a tale of family and fracture, compassion and selfishness—a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we strive to fill them.

Spanning thirty years, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irreparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen’s four children leave the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in Dublin, New York, and Mali, West Africa. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold.

A profoundly moving work about a family’s desperate attempt to recover the relationships they’ve lost and forge the ones they never had, The Green Road is Enright’s most mature, accomplished, and unforgettable novel to date.

Quotes & Awards

“With language so vibrant it practically has a pulse, Enright makes an exquisitely drawn case for the possibility of growth, love, and transformation at any age.”

People

“Enright…is a master of emotional excavation…Through her wise and majestic book, [she] shows us the beauty even in life’s harsh terrain.”

O, The Oprah Magazine

“A book of brawny prose sheathed in cool intelligence.”

Economist (London)

“Gripping.”

Vanity Fair

“An impressive novel that bounces its readers through some fairly rocky
terrain… Enright writes with authority and confidence not just about her native
Ireland but about the AIDS-stricken New York in which Dan is making his way and
the poverty-stricken Mali.”

New York Times Book Review

“Welcome to the Madigan family of County Clare: four children, all contending in various ways with the emotional tyranny of their never-satisfied mother, Rosaleen…This is a rich, capacious story, buoyed by tender humor, something like Anne Tyler with a brogue.”

Washington Post

“Enright’s razor-sharp writing turns every ordinary
detail into a weapon, to create a story that cuts right to the bone.”

New York Review of Books

“Flawless…This novel is a vibrant family portrait, both pitiless and compassionate, witty and stark.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Enright trails the Madigans over three decades, illuminating their trials and triumphs as reflective of not only their distinctive personalities and personal interests but also Irish society moving into the modern era of contraception, economic boom and bust, and open homosexuality.”

Booklist (starred review)

“This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan…allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life’s larger abstractions.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Alana Kerr uses a light Irish accent to narrate the chapters about the widowed mother and her daughters, one a natural caregiver and the other who is battling personal demons. Soft-spoken Lloyd James and the gruffer Gerard Doyle narrate the sections about the brothers, one coming to terms with his sexuality and the other an aid worker in Africa.”

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